International Biodiversity Day
In recognition of International Biodiversity Day and as a highly resonating theme for us at RSK Wilding, our team decided to do something a little different in both celebrating and contemplating our work to date in the movement to build back biodiversity.
RSK Wilding is helping to promote and implement habitat restoration across the UK, benefitting not only the aspects we can see and enjoy but also the health, longevity and biodiversity of land and what lives on it. Promoting and improving biodiversity ensures that we rebuild and sustain the immense variability of nature and wildlife in the UK (and beyond) in order to reap greater support for human and societal needs, including food and nutrition security and, most importantly, at no further cost to the land and our wildlife.
The work we do provides solutions to clients so that they can navigate successful paths through both changes in and discussions of biodiversity net gain (BNG), ecological recovery, new nature markets and everything in between, such as the array of wider ecosystem relationships for people and land. It means that we are acutely aware of what is needed within the UK to be moving in the right direction as we see the successes and challenges evolve on the ground. We are confident in BNG as a new and interesting piece in the puzzle that will get us to where we need to be, as will finding the required £54 billion to fund nature’s recovery in the UK.
We asked the RSK Wilding team to briefly identify and state, at a high level, what they think is the most important or number-one action in the journey to building back biodiversity in the UK. We then ran a poll to gather opinions on the order of priority for each suggestion. Out of the responses, three suggestions received significantly more support than the others. In order of highest ranking, these were narrowed down to:
- large-scale land use change, including regenerative agriculture
- restoration at scale and in the right place
- cultural transformation – a belief and action to get to nature positive.
Large-scale land use change is for bettering integration with nature, practising regenerative agriculture and hoping for an effective land use strategy for England, which is due later in 2023. Food production is still critical but should not be at the expense of our wildlife and river habitats; therefore, we can and must do better.
Restoration at scale and in the right place fits in well with the development of exciting and exemplar projects such as Cairngorms Connect, which is the largest scheme of its kind in the UK. In addition, there are the ambitious new initiatives such as Wilder Pentwyn, The Great North Bog and the urban rewilding of Allestree Park by Derbyshire Wildlife Trust, as well as numerous leading lights of well-established initiatives such as the RSPB and United Utilities’ Wild Haweswater, Moors for the Future, Knepp Estate rewilding and Wild Ennerdale. Numerous estates and landowners have also been fulfilling their aspirations: regenerative agriculture and rewilding at Wild Ken Hill and the integration of sustainable land management and environmental gain at Holkham Estate are great examples.
The combination of the requirement for Local Nature Recovery Strategies in England to help bed this into planning, the Landscape Recovery funding ability to provide cash and investment pilots in Scotland may help lead the way and ensure scales of financial flows are equivalent to our ambition. In BNG especially, we hope that off-site mitigation can significantly help delivery on a strategic scale via restoration in the right places for increased impact.
Ecology and habitat restoration are indispensable disciplines in predicting, identifying and responding to growing environmental risk, and the future of these specialities requires outlined priorities accepted not only by professionals in the industry but also by the public. Here at RSK Wilding, we are helping to create this future. Cultural transformation as a joint belief to get nature positive is no small point to address. However, our support has to reach further as an increasingly understood movement if biodiversity is to be built back. So far, we have failed to reverse biodiversity loss and environmental degradation as a UK population; this is heavily contributed to by our farming practices and provision demand. Perhaps it has resulted from a failure to embed ecological knowledge in public discourse and in management and policy decision processes. For this knowledge to be delivered successfully, there must be efforts in communicating this ecological understanding that society needs for a more ecologically vibrant and resilient environment for interdependent living. It requires us all to be pushing the boundaries, influencing clients, politicians and members of the public to support this as a cooperative change.